Senate committee to vote to hold Steward Health Care CEO in contempt

BOSTON (AP) — Members of a Senate committee looking into the Steward Health Care bankruptcy said they plan to adopt two resolutions next week to hold Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre in contempt — one for civil enforcement and another for certification to the United States Attorney for criminal contempt — after he refused to attend a U.S. Senate hearing Thursday despite being issued a subpoena.

If approved, both resolutions will go to the full Senate for a vote.

The first resolution instructs the Senate legal counsel to bring a civil suit requiring de la Torre to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The criminal contempt resolution would refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to criminally prosecute de la Torre for failing to comply with the subpoena.

“We were hopeful that Dr. de la Torre would comply with our bipartisan subpoena and appear before the committee to testify to the harm Steward has caused to patients, health care workers, and the communities in which they live,” said Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the committee’s chair.

“Unfortunately, we have no choice but to move forward and pursue both civil enforcement of the subpoena and criminal charges against Dr. de la Torre,” he added.

In a written statement, Steward defended de la Torre’s decision not to attend the hearing and to again ask that it be rescheduled, saying that not only is it inappropriate for him to testify about Steward’s bankruptcy while those proceedings are ongoing but that he’s also banned by a federal court from doing so.

“The Committee continues to ignore the fact that there is an ongoing settlement effort underway with all interested parties that paves the way to keep all of Steward’s remaining hospitals open and preserve jobs,” the statement said. “Dr. de la Torre will not do anything that could jeopardize this effort.”

The announcement of next week’s planned vote following a hearing into Steward.

Sanders said de la Torre and his Texas-based Steward, which operated about 30 hospitals nationwide and filed for bankruptcy in May, is a prime example what happens when private equity investors purchase hospitals, strip their assets and saddle them with debt they can never pay back.

“Dr. de la Torre became obscenely wealthy by loading up hospitals from Massachusetts to Arizona with billions of dollars in debt and selling the land underneath these hospitals to real estate executives,” Sanders said.

Steward has been working to sell its more than a half-dozen hospitals in Massachusetts but received inadequate bids for two other hospitals — Carney Hospital in Boston and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in the town of Ayer — both of which have closed as a result.

A federal bankruptcy court last week approved the sale of Steward’s other Massachusetts hospitals.

Steward has also shut down pediatric wards in Massachusetts and Louisiana, closed neonatal units in Florida and Texas, and eliminated maternity services at a hospital in Florida.

At the same time, de la Torre has reaped hundreds of millions of dollars personally and bought a $40 million yacht and a $15 million luxury fishing boat, Sanders said.

Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston, testified at the hearing that under Steward management, patients were subjected to preventable harm and even death, particularly in understaffed emergency departments.

One 81-year-old man who came in for chemotherapy for his pancreatic cancer died before staff could get to him, according to MacInnis, who said there were 95 patients in the emergency department on that shift but only 11 nurses.

She said there were other nights when emergency room staff didn’t have Similac, Pedialyte or even diapers and were forced to run out to a 24-hour store to get supplies. She also said there was a time when Steward failed to pay a vendor who supplied bereavement boxes for the remains of newborn babies who had died and had to be transported to the morgue.

“Nurses were forced to put babies’ remains in cardboard shipping boxes,” she said. “These nurses put their own money together and went to Amazon and bought the bereavement boxes.”

MacInnis also pointed to the death of a 39-year-old woman who had a normal childbirth but was bleeding and might have been saved by a device called an embolization coil, but there hadn’t been any in the hospital because they had been repossessed by the vendor.